History isn't over. Despite loud proclamations twenty years ago that the end of the Cold War marked "the end of history" and the beginning of a time when everything would essentially be stable and the same forevermore, that hasn't happened, and it won't. The one thing we can be certain of about the future is that it will be different from today
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Exactly -- to you change is not unthinkable. When I was in Paris in 1991 I was talking with a young woman my age named Severine who was an assistant stage manager at the Opera Comique. In those days things were very unsettled, what with change in the Former Yugoslav Republics and the breakup of the Soviet Union, and I asked her if she feared war. She said that Paris had been trashed when her parents were children in World War II, and France had been trashed when her grandparents were children in World War I, and when her great grandparents were children in the Commune and Franco Prussian War, and she figured that if it happened again she'd just get through it the way her family always did. She shrugged. "It happens."
And that's the thing Americans don't understand. It's inconceivable. It cannot happen. It is so impossible that people completely deny that anything is going on, except in fiction, because even thinking that something might happen is fringe and crazy. And I see that's a thing about us that makes no sense to you! How can we believe that political change is literally impossible?
Re your socialized medicine -- I don't know. It may be size. But even near implosion, listening to shezan talk about her experiences with the system, it's so far and away better than what we have that it isn't even funny.
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And we can never get to the discussion of if it's necessary or the best option or what it should look like because even bringing it up is considered INSANE! And so I fear that when it happens we will make all decisions on the fly, unconsidered, because there is no time to consider and no time to decide what we want, only time to react.
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